1922 Ford T-Bucket - Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Clone

If you were at the Detroit Autorama in Cobo Hall a year ago, you may have been part of the crowd mobbed around this month's STREET RODDER cover car. Ours is not the first magazine with an image of the famous Kookie Car, or a remarkable replica, popping off the cover. In its day, that flamed roadster pickup was one of the most groundbreaking hot rods around, and since then has become one of the most famous and influential hot rods ever. Virtually every T bucket built in the last 50 years can tip its hat to Norm Grabowski's original T-from spittin' image replicas like this one, to similar-but-not-identical tribute cars, to countless other roadsters built by guys who might not even realize that their hot rods reflect design ideas that Grabowski thought of first.

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The first magazine to feature a cover photo of Grabowski's flamed blue roadster was Car Craft. Ron Kregoski was 14 years old when he picked up that Apr. '57 issue and vowed that someday he would own a roadster just like the one on the cover. "The little roadster was so crazy looking for the time," he remembers. "I was used to cool red or black roadsters or coupes in other magazines-but here is this wild, open-wheeled car, with a crazy 10-degree rake, a wild exhaust system and, new for the day, bright yellow and red flames. It had a monster Caddy engine with four 97s, a beehive filter, a severely chopped Deuce grille, a shortened Model A pickup bed and, on top of all things, a tall shift lever with a bloody skull knob." Grabowski's car left a lasting impression on Ron, but it would be 50 years before he would fulfill his teenage vow.

3/20Tony Nancy finished the interior for Grabowski. Ron's replica cockpit features a handbuilt bench from Reno Rod & Custom with a plywood riser and sheetmetal back conforming to the body. Midwest Automotive & Auto Trim added the red vinyl to the seat and panels. A Bell three-spoke wheel rotates on a shortened '40 Chevy truck column. Note the dash plaque from the '55 Grand National Roadster Show.

Grabowski was a young teenager himself when he got interested in hot rods. "When I was going to high school, there was a guy there with a '27 T roadster-no fenders and real low," he told us. "Then I got my dad to take me to a car show and after that I was hooked."

Grabowski was in his early twenties when he swapped the body of his '31 Model A for a cut-down T touring with an equally cut-down Model A pickup bed. He shortened the rear 'rails by 20 inches, and Z'd the frame to lower the stance. He stretched the front 'rails by 5 inches and relocated the front axle out in front of the crossmember. A 3-71 blown '52 Cadillac engine sat on the 'rails for all to see. Tony Nancy stitched a red tuck 'n' roll interior to contrast the black paint. That's what it looked like at the '55 Grand National Roadster Show and when it appeared on the cover of Hot Rod's Aug. '55 issue as the Lighnin' Bug.

Hot rod movies were popular at that time, and when the Hollywood studios found out about the local kid with the radical car, they started using the roadster in movies. "The first thing they did when I took it to the studio-ran it into a big post," Grabowski recalls. "I had to get the frame straightened, get new radius rods, and replace the windshield. That was my first connection with Neil Emory and Valley Custom. Emory was a genius with metal and so creative with ideas." Not long after that, the T underwent a transformation that included a more pronounced rake, four Strombergs sprouting out of a Horne intake manifold, '56 Dodge Royal Lancer Blue lacquer paint, and flames and pinstripes by Dean Jeffries.

4/20L&L Automotive did the machining and assembly on the '52 Cadillac 331, bored 0.030-over to 354 ci. The rare Horne manifold is topped with four of the new Stromberg Genuine 97s made in England. They were shipped to Advanced Plating to be chromed, and then back to England for reassembly. The finned Offenhauser valve covers, beehive oil filter, and chromed 12-volt Cadillac generator are some of the car's well-known dress-up items. The transmission is a rebuilt '39 Ford top loader three-speed.

A few years ago, Ron, still in love with the 1922 Ford T-Bucket, was searching eBay when he came across a '27 roadster pickup, with a hopped-up four-banger and mechanical brakes. The car was sold before he could place a bid, so Ron called the seller to see if other projects were available. It was Johnnie Overbay at Reno Rod & Custom Supply in Oklahoma City. During their conversation, Ron expressed his determination to someday build a clone of the Kookie car. Overbay asked, "Why don't we build that for you?" Overbay already had his hands on a '37 V-8/60 front axle, a rebuilt '39 top loader, and a '41 rearend-and had a lead on a 331 Cadillac engine.

Ron found a "sad, but complete" '22 T body on eBay and won the bid with $400. "After picking up the body in Nebraska, I proceeded to Oklahoma City, where I was greeted by Overbay and his crew: shop foreman Doug Burba, Chris Guterrez, Gordon Burba, and Bill Norris. I could see that this old-school shop could fulfill my lifelong desire to own the Kookie Car."

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In the '50s, Grabowski's T was getting a lot of attention on the street. "I was blowing minds-people with their mouths open, running through red lights. Cruising Hollywood Boulevard at night, I would stop somewhere and come back out and the car would be surrounded with people 10 deep-all over it, looking under it, looking all around it. The reaction was just unbelievable."

6/20The Kookie Car grille is the upper portion of a '32 shell filled with a custom mesh screen. The radiator is a '56 Austin-Healy unit with a five-row core. It took pinstriper Rick Knight several days to accurately reproduce this specific version of Dean Jeffries pinstriping.

The car mags were also paying attention, but it wasn't until a photo of the T appeared in a '57 Life magazine story on the hot rod lifestyle that society at large got its first look. It wasn't long before it got its second look. Grabowski was still connected to the studios when, in 1958, ABC premiered 77 Sunset Strip, a detective series featuring Edd Byrnes as a young parking lot attendant nicknamed Kookie, who spoke in hipster slang and drove a Model T hot rod, played by Grabowski's roadster.

The popularity of the TV series and the teen idol status of Edd Byrnes' Kookie character made the car famous and gave it the nickname that it, and every replica, has worn since. Johnnie Overbay remarked on the impact. "Folks in California might have been used to hot rods, but for kids in the Midwest, seeing one on a TV show was something exciting, and might have been the thing that propelled them into hot rodding."

7/20The dash was built and painted based on early photos, and filled with Stewart Warner Wings gauges. Photos of the original car show a spoon throttle pedal, except the photos from Car Craft, which show the arm-and-ball pedal like the one you see here.

When Ron and Overbay and the Reno Rod & Custom team decided that if they were going to recreate the Kookie Car they were determined to do it as accurately as possible. "We talked to Grabowski a lot, picking his brain as much as we could," Doug Burba told us. "Other than that, we had to rely on photos from magazines, as well as stills and even some of the old home movies used in [the recent video documentary] The Car That Ate My Brain."

"We became completely absorbed with this car," Overbay said. "We bought every publication we could find, including teen magazines of the day with articles on Edd Byrnes, just because they might include a photograph of the car that would reveal something."

8/20Grabowski and Ron both took their taillights from '54 Buicks.

The biggest challenge, according to Ron, "was finding enough clear and undistorted photos to build off of. It would have been much easier to stray from the original car, but we were determined to build an exact clone."

A bigger challenge came from the fact that the original car was a constant work in progress. What Ron and the crew at Reno found out from poring through hundreds of photos was that Grabowski never stopped modifying the car. "He told us that it changed weekly," explained Burba. "That car had its paint rubbed on so many times-we've got magazines where the pinstriping changes from photo to photo in the same article."

Choosing the Car Craft version of the car as the one to clone solved that problem, but ultimately caused others. Self-appointed experts, familiar with only one of the original's many looks, are quick to point out "mistakes" in the car. For example, one difference between Ron's car and Von Franco's famous replica is the tailpipes. On Von Franco's (and the TV) version, they rise straight up above the body. On Ron's, they turn rearward along the upper edge of the bed (as they do in the Car Craft and Life photos).

In addition to keeping all the components and details true to the original, there was the challenge of keeping the quality true to the original. The original Kookie Car was remarkable and ahead of it's time-but it was also a street car built 50-plus years ago by a young guy with a budget, who "drove it like a Ferarri," as Grabowski recently told us. "I took it to the drags. I drove it over Angeles Crest Highway, taking it around corners sideways, and into slides. It was a fun car!" Few of today's top shelf trophy winners are that kind of "fun," and to keep it an accurate clone, Overbay and his guys had to be careful not to build Ron's T better than Grabowski's.

9/20In addition to building the Kookie Car and essentially inventing the T-bucket, Grabowski is famous for his hand-carved wooden skull shift knobs. But the original Kookie Car didn't have one, and this one doesn't either. It's an old plaster cast version like the one he bought at Disneyland. Ron found his on eBay and applied the blood paint (Larry Watson did the original) himself.

"It's got all the defects that were in the real car," Overbay said. "The interior is very crude by today's standards, but that's how the interior looked. And the painter wasn't happy because we wouldn't let him color sand and buff the paint. We wanted a little bit of orange peel, like you'd find on a teenager's street-driven car."

Those intentional imperfections made Overbay a little nervous as Ron's Kookie clone was displayed among the flawless high-end show cars at its '09 Detroit Autorama debut. He had nothing to worry about.

10/20Another cheerful skull smiles from between the '41 Ford banjo rearend and the Model A springs. Overbay says he wanted to ask Grabowski how many '50s fathers let their princesses go out on dates in a carriage like this!

"It seemed to be an instant success," Ron recalled. "Everyone, from all of my good buddies to small children to pretty girls and all of the old gearheads, just adored this piece of hot rod history. And to top things off there was Grabowski signing autographs and entertaining everyone."

"Rolling into Cobo Hall, we were wondering if they were going to laugh us out of the place-but everybody got it," Overbay said. "In fact, even against all the super-slick, super-nice cars, this was the one with the crowd of people around it."